Cities: Skylines 2 was revealed a few months ago, but with only a CG trailer and not many details. Now there's a new in-game trailer and at least a vague sense of what the citybuilding sequel will do differently than its venerable, many DLC'd predecessor. Mainly: bigger cities, more simulated cities, prettier cities.
It also brought news of a release date: October 24th.
MMO raids can be some of the most satisfying experiences in multiplayer gaming, so it's a shame that they're so often one of the last things you gain access to after a whole lot of time and grinding. That makes me very interested in 33 Immortals, the newly announced next game from Jotun and Spiritfarer studio Thunder Lotus. It's a 33-player cooperative action roguelikelike which they say offers "ultra-fast runs through a streamlined distillation of the MMO raid experience," with "pick-up and raid" matchmaking. Huh!
At tonight's Xbox showcase, there was a first proper look at upcoming heist 'em up sequel Payday 3. To skip to the end: it looks a lot like past Paydays, inasmuch as it's a co-op first-person shooter that's less about clever breaking and entering and more about mowing down waves of cops.
The trailer also came with a release date: September 21st.
It is still weird that Microsoft started making a new Fable only a few short years after closing the studio which created the fantasy RPG series, Lionhead. But they are, a new trailer from NotE3 reminds us. The trailer doesn't show much of the Fable reboot being made by Forza Horizon studio Playground Games, but it does star a digtal Richard Ayoade, so I'm not complaining. He's nice, that Richard Ayoade. Come meet his digidouble in the new trailer.
Tonight yet another Star Wars game was revealed, this time coming from Lucasfilm (but they all come from them, technically) and Ubisoft. Star Wars Outlaws is, being an Ubi game, an open world adventure where you play as Kay Vess - the Han-Solo-but-a-girl I reference in my headline - and Kay's best alien pal Nix "as they attempt one of the greatest heists the Outer Rim has ever seen." Outlaws was revealed tonight at the Xbox Games Showcase with a trailer that had an extended opening metaphor bit about gambling that was trite enough for me to assume it was a trailer for the Quantic Dream Star Wars game. BUT. I do like the look of Outlaws (currently slated for 2024).
Welcome to our PC Gaming Show liveblog, where we’ll be bringing you some extremely live coverage of PC Gamer’s contribution to the current NotE3/Summer Game Fest proceedings. If it’s anything like last year’s, the 2023 PC Gaming Show will be a breathless barrage of PC-focused game announcements, reveals, and trailers – and myself and Liam will be on hand to relay them all, one or two lines at a time.
We’re rolling out the liveblog widget once again for today’s Xbox Games Showcase, as well as the Starfield-focused Starfield Direct, which will follow immediately after. And will be about Starfield. Come join us – we’ll be up and running just before Microsoft’s main showcase begins at 6pm BST / 1pm EDT / 10am PDT.
Mortal Kombat 1 is surely going to delight fans of fighting games and fans of Mortal Kombat. Having given it a whirl for around 45 minutes at Summer Game Fest, I'm convinced it's gorgeous, gory, and guaranteed to please a demanding electronic sports audience who can actually memorise inputs and string together combos. Yet, the entirety of my time with Mortal Kombat 1 had me desperate for an equivalent to Street Fighter 6's modern control scheme: a simplified remap of the buttons which enables anyone to hop in and do cool moves.
Behind an ominous door next to a pizza joint, I bore witness to 30 minutes of Alan Wake 2 in an extended presentation based on the trailer you might have seen at the sumSummer Game Fest showcase. I didn't get to see any of Alan himself, but I did get to see a slice of horror, investigation, and action as the other playable character Saga Anderson. And without a doubt, Remedy are making a big push for this to be a detective game alongside a survival horror one. My first impressions? Yeah, strong.
Right folks, listen up: from just 30 minutes of Cocoon, I'm already convinced it's one of the best games here at Summer Game Fest 2023. It's the Annapurna one masterminded by Jeppe Carlsen, the lead gameplay designer for Playdead's Inside. And in the 30 minutes I spent with it, I actually sat up on the sofa and did a colossal goblin lean towards the telly in full view of everyone. I needed to commune properly with the mighty insect lad, who hoists orbs that contain entire worlds onto his back in the game's wonderful mix of puzzler and top-down action. He commanded my full attention and he got it all.
I've never been a Sonic fan, but I thought Sonic Superstars looked pretty good at Geoff Fest earlier this week. It's an old-fashioned sidescrolling platformer rendered in a 3D art style faithful to the original games, and it's playable in co-op.
Now there's ten minutes of gameplay footage to let you watch a couple of levels played through in nearly their entirety.
Airborne Kingdom was about constructing a floating city in the sky; you figuratively and literally balanced your construction of homes and industry as you floated around and interacted with settlements on the ground to gather resources. Nate called it an "absolute delight" two years ago.
Now there's a sequel on the way. Airborne Empire starts with the same basics of citybuiilding, but now your constructions will be under siege from sky pirates.
Resistor is a narrative racing game. That alone is enough to intrigue me, but it's also got vehicular combat, a slick art style, and it's from a new games studio founded by the creator of some really excellent Team Fortress 2 shorts. You'll find the announcement trailer below.
Wholesome Direct is my favourite showcase from not-E3, because I feel like it's a show directly catered to my interests. Cats, cooking, seaside towns, pretty landscapes, magical girls - Wholesome Direct has it all. This year we from the RPS Indiescovery Podcast watched the show and have plucked out a handful of games that we're looking forward to the most, which was pretty difficult. There were a lot of great games this year.
There were around 70 games spotlighted during the showcase, so there was no way we could possibly list them all, but we've done our best and here are our bestest best picks. If you're after more gaming news and announcements from this year's not-E3 check out our coverage of not-E3 2023, Summer Game Fest round-up, and Day Of The Devs round-up. For now though, have a pleasant scroll through which wholesome games we have our eyes on.
Adorable exploration and platformer game Smushi Come Home has just been shadow-dropped as part of this year's Wholesome Direct, meaning you can play it right now. The game follows the titular Smushi, a small mushroom, as it makes its way out of a forest to get back home. Along the way, it'll meet and help out many of the forest's inhabitants. If the combination of tiny shroom guy, chill exploration, and light puzzling hasn't convinced you, take a look at the game's launch trailer below.
My brain is still a little broken from Thursday night's announce-o-ramas and woof, we're headed back into it with Microsoft, Starfield, and PC Gaming Show streams on Sunday night too. Please prepare a nice cold little wooden box for me. Anyway! Forget future games, which present games are you playing this weekend? Here's what we're clicking on!
Earlier today, Mr. Diablo at Blizzard Rod Fergusson tweeted what the most played class was in Diablo 4 so far. To my great surprise, it wasn't the Rogue, which is currently sitting at the top of our tier list. Rather, it's the Sorcerer, which currently sits at the bottom of our class rankings. Presumably, everyone loves watching ice shards and lightning bolts leave their fingertips. So, is the majority of Diablo 4's player-base wrong, or are we? Feel free to come defend your spell-slinger in the comments.
The glut of "old school" shooters has largely passed me by, not least because I can easily play Doom today if I want to. But Kvark looks to Half-Life instead of the Doomquake clone era, and is all the better for it. You're a worker/prisoner in a sinister nuclear facility deep under 1980s Czechoslovakia where things, as you might guess, have gone terribly wrong.
The satirical Soviet posters and propaganda reels are here, but used sparingly, and more convincingly than the usual "Russia, haha! Vodka! lol!" fare, and although all its parts are fairly familiar, Kvark feels distinct enough that I had a hard time actually putting it down.
Like lots of people in the RPS Treehouse right now, I've been squeezing in bits of Diablo 4 around the various Summer Game Fest streams happening this week. I'm having a decent, if mildly monotonous time so far, mostly because I haven't unlocked all my Druid's abilities just yet, but I'm keen to keep going with it, mostly because I just like turning into a bear and a wolf every three seconds to whack some evil skelly boys, innit. When I was logging off the other day, though, I had a fleeting glance at Diablo 4's shop. Not to actually buy anything, I should stress. I'm not one for cosmetics in any shape or form. But I just wanted to see what ludicrous things it was trying to sell me for real human money. And one item for sale was, of course, some fancy horse armour, and it cost six English pounds and thirty nine pence. £6.39! For a mangey rope bridle and a bone dagger on its side! (You can see it in the header image up top there). Ridiculous, I exclaimed, and promptly shut down my PC.
The next morning, I was talking about this daft bit of armour with the RPS Treehouse when Alice0 suddenly introduced me to the weird and wonderful world of cheap horse games on Steam. After all, why spend upwards of £6 on a pointless cosmetic item when you could feasibly put that money toward 6 whole horse games that have actually dozens of horses in them? So join me as we discover how many horse games you can buy on Steam for the same price as Diablo 4's horse armour.
It's impossible to determine just how long ago 2014 was. Wisdom would dictate it sits around the 9 year mark, but no one truly believes that. Endless Legend? That was no more than two years ago, and I'll throw hands if anyone suggests otherwise. But apparently enough time has passed that just about every 4X game that came out that year has now been superceded by a newer title in the series. Civilization: Beyond Earth, Galactic Civilizations 3, Age Of Wonders 3, and Endless Legend made 2014 an incredibly strong year for strategy games, but nowadays, who really still plays these older entries?
I don't mean to sound derisive. It's a sombre truth. At 233 hours, I've put more time into Endless Legend than any other 4X strategy game in my Steam library, and loved every minute of it. To this day it's still the best in the genre when it comes to sparking the imagination of my chronically fantasy-loving brain. The music, the amazing variety in terrain and units, the sheer quantity of words bringing to life every last quest, minor faction, creature, and environmental anomaly. It's a simply splendid game. The question is whether it's still worth playing today.
I'm sad to say that I've long passed the stage where covering a trailer show like Summer Game Fest makes me feel almost nothing, because for me it's a work event where I have to stay up to 1am drinking emergency Fanta, writing posts while I try to remember the name of yer man, you know, from the first game, the guy with the hair. But you know what makes me feel something? An established film and TV actor only bothering to fix his hair a minimal amount before he films a front facing phone camera video to intro a clearly terrible TV based on a game. Goddamn, that's the stuff.
Sludge Life 2 wasn't officially a part of the line-up at Summer Game Fest last night, but it's damn well stolen the show for me today. A demo for the game dropped yesterday, and I've spent about an hour in what developer Terri Vellman describes as a 10 minute experience.
Welp, it feels like this has been a long time coming. Friday The 13th: The Game will no longer be on sale by the end of the year, due to license expiration. The asymmetric multiplayer game, based on the film series of the same name, has had a rough time over the years. In 2018, it was caught up in the dispute between the original film's producer and writer, causing publisher Gun Media to halt all DLC plans. In 2020, the game's dedicated servers were killed, but online play limped on via peer-to-peer matchmaking.
A game of Paradox's sci-fi strategy Stellaris can take so long that, in all honesty, I've never finished it. I always lose interest at some point and start a new civilisation because I mostly want to try out new weird ideas for a new weird empire, not actually rule that empire and fight its endgame wars. That makes me mighty interested in Stellaris Nexus, an upcoming turn-based spin-off which aims to offer a full multiplayer 4X experience in under an hour.
The honestly named survival sandbox 'em up Wizard With A Gun got a chunky new gameplay trailer at tonight's Devolver Digital Direct showcase, along with the news that you can try it all out for yourself right this second thanks to a hip new demo. If you ever thought Bastion could do with some crafting, this will probably be right up your street.
Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth - the second part of the FFVII remake - has finally been shown. Its first trailer popped up at the end of this evening's Summer Game Fest, alongside the news that it'll launch early 2024 on PlayStation 5 and that it will come on two discs. There's no mention of a PC release yet.
Summer is when you do guilty sinful things, right? You wear clothes that expose your unchristian knees and you eat a lot of ice cream, for which you should self-flagellate, and so on. Fittingly, sequel to unabashedly Catholic-y Metroidvania Blasphemous is out on August 24th, as revealed in a trailer at tonight's Summer Game Fest. Blasphemous 2, which was only revealed back in April, looks to be similar to the fist game, i.e. it's a side-scrolling Soulslike drenched in the most bloody and grim Christian imagery you can think of. Category is: Holy See.
If you and your pals have had enough of your usual MMO haunts, why not try something new like Wayfainder? Developed by the folks behind Darksiders Genesis and Ruined King: A League Of Legends Story, Wayfinder casts you as either a rogue, a knight, a berserker, or shooty-shooty person on a quest to stop the evil Gloom from consuming the world. Early access starts this summer and you can check out the trailer from this year's Summer Game Fest for more information below.
Update: Yup, it's official, obvs. More info and better-quality trailers added below.
In this week of oh so many announcements, you can't blame anyone for getting carried away and jumping the gun. Unfortunately for Persona developers Atlus, it seems they accidentally announced two games earlier than intended. Eagle-eyed fans say Atlus's Instagram today posted trailers for Persona 3 Reload, a remake of the 2006 RPG, and grid-based tactics spin-off Persona 5 Tactica. While they're no longer on the Insta, folks say they've saved the trailers so you can see them too.
Day Of The Devs and its indie game festivities returned for this year's Summer Game Fest, once again proving that indie games are good and cool. Quite frankly, it was an hour or so of straight bangers ranging from mind-bending puzzlers to Pokémon-likes to emotionally charged shepherders.
While there's some familiar names in the pack like Hyper Light Drifter and Cocoon, there's a whole host of surprises in there. And that's thanks to the folks over at Double Fine Productions, iam8bit, and PlayStation's indie champion Greg Rice who put all of this together for us to enjoy each year. Below, I've rounded up all the announcements so you can absorb them through your eyeballs and let them rattle around your head until launch.
For lovers of fun co-op puzzle games to have a laugh with friends, here's some great news. Chaotic puzzler Human: Fall Flat is getting a sequel and it looks to be just as much of a riot as the first one. Aptly named Human Fall Flat 2 (minus the colon), it looks like this follow-up will take place on different construction sites - the safest of places on Earth for slapstick and silliness to run free. There's not much we can glean from the short trailer that debuted during the Devolver Showcase at this year's Summer Game Fest, but you can have a watch for yourself below.
Tonight's Summer Game Fest was absolutely stacked with new game announcements and shiny new trailers, so in case you missed it or you just want to recap the biggest reveals from the show, we've gathered them all here below for your viewing pleasure. Here's everything that was announced at the 2023 Summer Game Fest.
For no particular reason, I decided to give Getting Over It With Bennett Foddy another go yesterday. I was then raving about how good it is to anyone who would listen in the RPS treehouse just a few hours ago.
I had no idea that its creator Bennett Foddy was going to reveal a new game tonight. That game is called Baby Steps, it's being made with the makers of Ape Out, and it looks like a mixture of QWOP and Getting Over It set in a beautiful 3D world. There's an excellent trailer below.
I've not played Yes, Your Grace but I hear it's brutal. The idea of being the sovereign of a kingdom and having to make difficult decisions makes me crumble quicker than a piece of shortbread in a cup of tea. But for those looking for the same power-hungry trip they felt in the first game, you'll be happy to know that it looks like developers Brave The Night have really upped the drama in the sequel, Yes Your Grace: Snowfall.
Announced during this year's Summer Game Fest, this follow-up looks equally as tense and you can feast your eyes (or cover them in horror) on the trailer below.
Over the last 18 months or so I have found myself asking, "how often must we play a new co-op zombie shooter?" and the answer has always been "at least once more". It seems to have been one of those things where a few years back a bunch of devs all noticed that there hadn't been one for a while, but didn't realise they weren't the only ones to have noticed until the games all started coming out. Anyway, Saber Interactive revealed John Carpenter's Toxic Commando, to be published by Focus Entertainment, at tonight's Summer Game Fest. It's an 80s-inspired FPS for up to four players, and you shoot a bunch of zombs.
There are still too few video games that feature non-transactional romance. Hopefully Banishers: Ghosts Of New Eden can help change that. It's a third-person action RPG from the makers of Vampyr and Life Is Strange that's about smashing monsters, but its pair of ghost-hunting protagonists are also lovers. A new trailer was shown during tonight's Geoff Fest.
Paradox beamed down into Geoff Keighley's Level Up Pool Party today to announce Star Trek: Infinite, a new grand strategy game arriving this autumn. Stinfinte will let you take command of the Federation, Romulan Star Empire, Cardassian Union, or Klingon Empire. Beyond that, we don't know much. Oh, but the Borg are on the loose. See 'em in the trailer below.
Okay, so he's not (I don't think) going to be in the full game, and if he is it won't be loads, but hearing John Rhys-Davies doing his Gimli voice over the trailer for Dwarf mining survival sim The Lord Of The Rings: Return To Moria is enough to warm the cockles of your 2001 self's heart, isn't it? Coming in that old favourite release window of "fall 2023", Free Range Games' Dwarf 'em up brought its first gameplay trailer to Summer Game Fest tonight, and we saw not only some examples of the building you can do on your quest to - hear me out - Return To Moria, but also the monsters that can emerge from the deep to stop you doing it.
Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 was announced at The Game Awards in 2021, and it resurfaced tonight at The Geoffer's other event, Summer Game Fest. The third-person boltgunner still doesn't have a precise release date, but a new trailer did reveal a full co-op campaign.
